Electric vehicles could be given free or discounted parking in London if the city’s mayor, Sadiq Khan, follows hard-hitting measures recommended in a new report.
The London Assembly Environment Committee report, published today, says “60% of Londoners do not have their own garage or driveway” and would therefore need to rely on on-street charging.
“Encouraging Londoners without their own driveway or garage to get an electric vehicle is the biggest challenge for take-up, as concerns about charging points are deep-rooted,” it says.
To convince more people to make the switch to an electric car, the report recommends all London boroughs make parking free or discounted for electric vehicles. It suggests doing this in the short-term only to “drive the take up”.
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A similar system is already offered in Milton Keynes, where drivers of electric cars can apply for a green permit free of charge and use 15,000 parking spaces. London's Westminster City Council also offers EV drivers lower parking rates, allowing them to pay the miminum fee but receive the maximum parking allowance of four hours.
There are around 12,000 electric cars on London’s roads, which is ten times the number that were present just five years ago. The new report states that “the growth in the number of electric vehicles is outstripping the number of charge points”, suggesting the city could quickly find itself short of chargers by a large margin.
It recommends that Transport for London provides funding for electric charging point installations, “where private sector investment is not happening quickly enough”.
This would be added to the existing On-street Residential Charging Scheme, which was introduced by the government and can be used to pay for 75% of charger installation costs. However, a spokesman for Chargemaster, one of the UK’s biggest charging point providers, said that since the funding is "ringfenced for capital expenditure", local authorities are "essentially forced to purchase charge points".
They said that reducing the restrictions on how the money could be used would enable boroughs to do "something more creative and work on a concession model with a company like us".
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Today’s report notes that the “spread, location and accessibility of electric charging points is more important than the number of charging points, so a strategic pan-London approach is needed”.
Leonie Cooper, a former chair of the environment committee, said “We need to get the number and location of charging points right, as well as raise awareness of charging points in the capital.”
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No Car London......!
Instead of making People buy Cars why not stop People driving to Work?, a Better Transport infrastructure would save money, make commuting less hazardous health wise, all Londoners would need to do is be more friendly to us foreigners....that’s a joke actually...
So the wealthy (those who can
So the wealthy (those who can afford an electric car) get free or subsidised parking where as the poor in their older diesels (bought because that was what the government wanted them to buy) will have to pay full price. Seems fair.
The article mentions
a similar scheme in Milton Keynes, that scheme is not just for pure EV's, its for PHEV's as well, any vehicle that emits 75g/kmCO2 or less and can travel 10 miles on pure electric power are eligible, so that includes vehicles such as the Range Rover P400e, a BMWi8 or a Porsche 918.
So lets be honest, who exactly will benefit from this, will it be the Nurses driving Zoes and Leafs, or will it be the usual crowd driving their new plug in Chelsea tractors.
Oh, forgot to mention, the Milton Keynes scheme allows them to use the bus lanes as well, I wonder if that will happen in London?
This scheme
The article only relates to EV's e.g. Zoe, LEAF, I3 (detailed several times including the number of EV's currently in London) not PHEV's e.g. Prius.
xxxx wrote:
EVs, are classed as ZERO or Ultra low emissions vehicles (ULEV) by the DVLA, and as such PHEV's fall into the same class, the only disctiction is for the amount of money available as a grant based on their performance.
Ultra low emission vehicles will be placed into categories on the basis of their CO2 emissions and their zero emission range. The categories are:• Category 1 – CO₂ emissions of less than 50g/km and a zero emission range of at least 70 miles• Category 2 – CO₂ emissions of less than 50g/km and a zero emission range between 10 and 69 miles• Category 3 – CO₂ emissions of 50 to 75g/km and a zero emission range of at least 20 miles.
Therefore for the purposes of free parking, PHEV's are classed as ULEV just like EV's.
TFL even classes the new LEVC TX Taxi as EV even though they are PHEV's.
You also mention the i3, the majority of i3s sold are the(PHEV) REX variants. will the technology or the parking warden enforcing these free spaces be able to tell the difference between an EV i3 and a i3REX, I suspect not.